The last post (better get my bugle out)
So, I started masking the ribs on the wings and it sucked...bigtime...

The idea is to mask the ribs and to spray a heavily diluted coat of a dark color (like Tamiya Smoke) to make the ribs stand out a bit more. The masking is boring as hell and uses up a lot of tape. I gave up after the first wing and figured out an easier way to get the same effect.
I made a cocktail of paint, Transparator (aka. "not varnish, we swear!") and some obscure brand of thinner, I used Burnt Umber for the white surfaces and Anthracit for the camo:
Sprayed it in a very light coat to darken the surface slightly:
Afterwards I went over the raised ribs with the same obscure brand of buffer:
The end result:
I had to do a bit of experimenting...

before I got it right but the end result was worth it and saved me a lot of time. It also worked on the curved raised areas that would have been very difficult to mask.
Next up was a bit of experimenting with metallics:
To get this worn copper effect I used the following, from left to right:
Unfortunately, things went downhill from there, here's some of the problems I dealt with.
- Paint not drying resulting in fingerprints everywhere and dust getting trapped in it
- Damaging the paint when trying to remove said fingerprints/dust
- Even though the wing assembly was well engineered, gluing them together and aligning them properly was a nightmare
- The photo-etch wiring was a pain in the backside ("STICK, YOU DAMNED SUPERGLUE!")
So, after many hours of frustration I gave the whole thing a gloss coat with Alclad Aqua Gloss, a pinwash with a mixture of Tamiya black and brown wash (about 50/50) and started sticking on the extra bits.
After that I gave the darker parts of the model a bit of drybrushing with Winsor & Newton Transparent white oil paint and added the antennae and control wires. For the end result see the reveal thread.
Thank you very much for reading!
